Catherine Kernan
MassArt_Visiting Professor_Spring-1996
Landscapes are metaphors for the erratic, often confusing, and sometimes revelatory paths we all navigate. We search our memories for clues to the future, even as every moment becomes the past. We unravel and reassemble the component parts of what we see. Likewise, my images ask to be unravelled and reassembled as they balance on the edge of abstraction. Underlying all is my belief that human relationships with the earth are dynamic and interactive.
The works in this exhibit from a series I call Sampling are small and are generated from sections of larger blocks. The color additions are comments, visual focal points. More usually. I carve 60” x 20” Baltic birch plywood, treating each block as a layer, a phrase in my vocabulary, rather than as individual complete images. Each print is unique, but usually includes residual elements from previous iterations and a different combination of blocks as I change colors, sequences, and transfer processes. I layer inks of different viscosities with large rollers. This leads to unpredictable and dramatic interactions between the inks. Offsetting images and interrupting transfers in a variety of ways, reflects the structure of memory itself. The layers collide, and the shadows elide, resulting images that hover on the edge of legibility. The process is a profound “be here now” experience of identifying with each drop of ink under pressure.
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